PROGRAMME

How City Index bridged the Dev/Ops divide Mike Lear, CIO of City Index in partnership with Delphix
Mike Lear joined City Index 5 years ago as Head Architect. Now the CIO he has overseen a move to Agile Development, continuous testing, continuous delivery and now DevOps. This involved refreshing and in some cases replacing the core infrastructure, adding innovative new technologies like data virtualization and building new business processes that could take advantage of such an agile platform. The result was the alignment of development, testing and infrastructure all working towards the same goal - continuous delivery.

New digital native players are disrupting the business models of different industries, such as retail, banking and insurance.

The new players have a strong advantage by building on a greenfield architecture that allows them to have very fast time to market at reasonable cost.

To compete with these players the incumbent companies have improve agility for the customer-facing part of their architecture while managing the core of their applications landscape with a strong focus on resilience and quality.

12.00 - 12.30

TOPIC TBCRichard Veryard, Senior Consultant - Glue Reply
(Richard Veryard has stepped in to replace Richard Dealtry, who unfortunately will not be able to attend due to an urgent health issue)

Top Leadership’s Commitment to EA Work – Support and GuidanceJorma Myyryläinen, Senior Enterprise Architect - Tietokarhu Ltd (part of Tieto group)
A well-known fact: it is essential and crucial to get leadership’s commitment to support EA-work and its enforcement. What it is, why it is important and how we achieve it? Some answers to questions:

What we achieve by leadership’s commitment? About aligning vision, strategy and business goals into change program. From business demands to EA agenda.

How to build confidence? About using advancing EA story as means of guiding the work and showing how business goals are transferred into practical change program.

How leadership’s strategic goals shape EA agenda? About focusing on business goals and achieving them. From ICT perspective to Developing business.

How to build EA culture? About recognising different interests of different stakeholders (especially top leadership’s special role as stakeholder), using right language when communicating with different interest groups. Architects’ role in orienteering with them when producing EA artifacts. Architects as cultural intermediators.

What we have learned from real life experience? About some observations made during EA work with Finnish Tax Authority. Rapid technical change vs. slow cultural change.

14.45 - 15.15

Reflecting on Enterprise Architecture as a Boundary Object for supporting change
Balbir Barn, Professor of Software Engineering, School of Science and Technology - Middlesex University

Enterprise architecture activities are increasingly prevalent because of their role in addressing business and IT alignment. Currently, the practice of enterprise architecture is primarily aimed at: documentation, communication, software design and decision-making. These multiple purposes of EA and the role of EA as an organizational boundary object generate challenges such as different semantic frames for each of these purposes. Reflections on the original metaphor of the notion of architecture and why faking of EA design processes is necessary are used as a motivation for reviewing Enterprise Architecture as primarily a means of theory building. It is proposed that simulation technologies for EA models especially those that can more easily represent organizational concerns are essential. Steps towards such technologies are described along with a language for defining requirements for addressing change drivers. Finally, a hitherto neglected aspect of the impact of EA on value sensitive concerns of users and their integration is also discussed.

15.15 - 15.35

Tea/Coffee break

15.40 - 16.10

Staying Relevant in the Digital EconomyMike Clark, Business Designer & Architect - Royal Mail
Enterprises are attempting to incorporate multi-channels, new customer insights and a much faster rate of change into their business models. In an attempt to tackle this complexity and dynamics of an evolving enterprise, the Enterprise and Business Architecture disciplines have continued to emerge, enabling the organisation to bring all the various moving parts together. Business capabilities and the term “business model” have slowly become part of everyday language amongst stakeholders. Yet even with these successes the disciplines are still too big a pill for management to swallow, and it’s value often gets lost. The challenge of collaboratively exploring potential futures with relevant stakeholders and practitioners of related disciplines still remains.

The shift in focus to digital channels requires a new way of using and leveraging architectures. This session will show:

how the architects of the future will create value quicker,

but also hide the complexity of architectures away, with a key shift to the creation of the views that resonate with all stakeholders.

We will also show how these new views and approach’s will quickly help drive the key analysis to enable stakeholders to select,

and define the strategies that generate the maximum value, ensuring they stay relevant in the customers new eco system.

16.10 - 16.40

CASE STUDY: What is Enterprise Architecture without Business Architecture?C.J. Ruggles, Senior Consultant - Glue Reply
Widespread recognition of the need for greater alignment of IT with business strategy has been mounting. But what are the implications of linking these two worlds together, when so often they seem at odds? What problems does this solve, and what new ones does it raise? Designing & delivering a business-led architecture is a significant shift, and needs to be done with awareness of how both business & technology objectives are achieved. It also requires our engagement with the wider business to become more structured & architecturally-led. We will explore how to approach this alignment, the challenges we face and how business architecture guides & supplements the other enterprise architecture domains.